Heart of Worcestershire College Achieves Resource Savings and Flexible Storage Expansion with DataCore SANsymphony

Using the existing hardware doesn’t mean that innovation has been hampered. Quite the opposite. What the team have been repeatedly successful in doing is using SANsymphony as the framework for digital innovation using SDS’s inherent policies to slot in new performance booster technology. For instance, auto-tiering toward SSDs to achieve enterprise grade performance and an easy non-invasive way to add storage to the pool has been repeatedly utilised since 2015. Now, HoW automatically tiers their hottest data to the highest performing, NVMe Flash cards and then cascades downward to SSDs in a logical tiered hierarchy based on data usage and importance. In total, the College now has four tiers of NVMe and Raid 10 SAS disks, accommodating the top tier applications such as SQL and databases. As the tiers fill, policy-based provisioning means that older, less used data automatically drops into lower tiers.

Moving forwards, when hardware is added, replaced or maintenance scheduled, HoW continues to confidently operate knowing that downtime will be avoided. Acting in an active:active configuration across the Worcester campus, the two DataCore nodes are in- sync at all times to ensure business continuity. With DataCore, no applications appear offline and data remains constantly available with new storage provisioned within clicks. The DataCore management console provides complete visibility of the entire vSphere infrastructure without having to jump between screens and interfaces, improving efficiency. Storage pooling is also integral. The team doesn’t have to consider correct allocation of storage for new virtual disks, they are allocated automatically.